Eye Control Plugin

Eye Control Plugin

I am researching the feasibility of creating a plugin to enable eye control (not tracking) of an email client for ALS and MS patients. I have the Tobii eye tracker 4c API (used by Microsoft in their Windows Insider release of eye gaze controls for Windows). Has anyone done anything with plugins to change the UI of the mail client?
_______________________________________________
dev-apps-thunderbird mailing list
[hidden email]https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-thunderbird

Re: Eye Control Plugin

On 12/30/17 5:58 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> I am researching the feasibility of creating a plugin to enable eye control (not tracking) of an email client for ALS and MS patients. I have the Tobii eye tracker 4c API (used by Microsoft in their Windows Insider release of eye gaze controls for Windows). Has anyone done anything with plugins to change the UI of the mail client?
>

This shouldn't be all to hard to do. With Thunderbird add-ons, you can
do almost anything to Thunderbird. I suspect you want to check for the
element the user is looking at and then set some CSS styles or classes
on it.

After translating the eye position to window coordinates, you can use
document.elementFromPoint() to determine the DOM element, and then set
whatever classes.

It seems the Tobii SDK has C# language bindings. Since binary extensions
are not possible, you could create a helper application and communicate
with it using standard input. The most future proof way to do this would
be to exchange JSON messages, preceded by a 32-bit value containing the
message length in native byte order. This is what native messaging
add-ons for Firefox do, and if we decide to employ a similar model you
wouldn't have much transition work to do.